Harold Meyerson

Recent Articles

As the local Chamber of Commerce has long been aware, the most breathtaking days in La-La Land are those that follow the midwinter rains. The smog is washed away and the snow-topped mountains that ring the city are abruptly visible, though it may be a balmy 70 degrees throughout the flatlands. On such days, it's easy to understand why America's first filmmakers decided to set up shop here 90 years ago (well, that and the dearth of unionized labor), and why generations of urban visionaries were inspired to sketch grand plans for the City of Angels. What defines this city, though, is that virtually none of those grand plans came to fruition. Los Angeles set the template for unplanned, sprawling, privatized growth. Time and again, the private defeated the public in the construction of L.A. The city became home to the largest number of backyard swimming pools and the smallest number of public parks. The great architects -- Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright -- designed private homes, not...

On the field of ideology, 2005 was a lousy year for the American right. Twice -- in the president's proposal to privatize Social Security and in the government's failure to save New Orleans -- it confronted the public with the prospect of a radically reduced government. Twice, the public recoiled at the sight. In retrospect the year's biggest mystery is how George W. Bush thought he could privatize Social Security. Essentially Bush assumed the role of the national CEO who tells his workers he's dumping their defined-benefit pensions for some ill-defined 401(k) investment schemes. And essentially the American people responded with the same anger and anxiety that airline and auto employees have shown when their bosses reneged on their commitments of a secure retirement. The difference, of course, is that the American people have a lot more power as voters than they do as workers. Bush's plan to scuttle Social Security was in tatters when Hurricane Katrina blew ashore. For Bush this was...

The conventional wisdom is still unpersuaded that the Republican Party is about to mount a full-force attack on American's undocumented immigrants -- of whom, by some counts, there are 11 million. After all, the Republicans are the party of employers -- large (agribusiness), medium (construction companies), and small (restaurateurs) -- who have long depended on immigrants for cheap labor. The cheap labor sectors of American capitalism are a huge source of donations for the GOP. How could the Republicans turn their back on them? But the conventional wisdom is wrong. Republicans are coming up on a midterm election in which their control of both houses of Congress is very much at stake. Their advantage in foreign and military policy has been diminished by the president's stunningly inept handling of the war in Iraq. And on the domestic and economic fronts, they have nothing to offer at all -- save only a greater zeal than the Democrats possess to “do something about immigration.” With...

The white Christmases that Irving Berlin dreamed of weren't the earliest ones he used to know. He spent his first five Christmases in czarist Russia, and his only recollection of that time, at least the only one he'd acknowledge as an adult, was that of watching his neighbors burn his family's house to the ground in a good old-fashioned, Jew-hating pogrom. So it's no surprise that when Berlin got around to writing his great Christmas song in 1941, nearly half a century after his family had fled the shtetl of Mohilev for New York's Lower East Side, it was flatly devoid of Christian imagery. It is, for all that, a religious song. It's just that Berlin's religion was America. "White Christmas" is an achingly nostalgic ballad, evoking a rural America where treetops glisten and sleigh bells ring. This was Currier and Ives country, an idealized winter landscape created for an urban nation that was busily shipping its young men overseas to fight Hitler and Japan. Amid the unprecedented...

Until two weeks ago, George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger were having a remarkably similar, and disastrous, year. Each began 2005 at the top of his game -- the president reelected with enhanced congressional majorities, the governator boasting an approval rating of 65 percent. Each then chose to govern well to the right of his electorate -- Bush promoting the privatization of Social Security, Arnold sponsoring ballot measures that would have cut spending on schools and diminished the power of the state's unions. Despite rising public discontent, each elected not to alter his course -- Bush refusing to scale back his war in Iraq, Arnold declining to cancel California's special election and call off his war on the labor movement. And last month, each experienced unprecedented defeat. In the House, Republican moderates opposed the spending cuts backed by Bush and their leaders, and California voters rejected all of Schwarzenegger's propositions. Today these two once-brightest stars...